[This is a re-post of our September 11th tribute originally collected on September 11th, 2011. We are always looking to add to this standing memorial, so please send Scott Creley your art, photos, and poetry.]

The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11th left an indelible mark on lives around the world. Ten [Eleven as of 2012] years later, we exist in a world that has, of course, been drastically altered.

I’ll leave the meta-fiction of politics and socio-economics to the people who immerse themselves in such things. Instead, we’ll be hosting a memorial of writing and art related to the events of September 11th.

This is our memorial to the people affected by the events of September 11th. Today, and during the rest of the week, we will host an array of art. Some of these pieces are elegies, some strike a chord of hope, some show the gritty truth of how some lives have changed. All of them are great works of art by great artists, and we thank them for their contributions.

If you have any images or words to add to this, please contact us!.
–Scott Creley

When you think of the children,
do you dream in color?
And when we were paraded
as a cause and a sin and a mother’s sorrow,
were you surprised we did anything else?

If you take a generation’s virginity
with four silver daggers,
two falling towers,
and a shit load
of speeches and committees,
do you expect us to smile at the tax hike?
Do you expect us to know when to stop?

If you are the product of a consequence
never the action,
does the TV lie to soothe
or to shape?
One day you’ll be old enough
to do it your kids.

We woke up to falling buildings,
and we are told to dream of burning angels,
and we were reminded of our loss,
and we have forgotten something greater.

We made heroes into advertisements,
we made villains into elections,
we made innocents into revenge,
and
we have forgotten something greater.

Working the Angles — Eric Morago

Would you like to buy some chocolate for Jesus?
he asks, waving candy bars like tickets he’s scalping
for a concert—one he’s certain I want into.

It is September 2002—the sun is a violent lover.
I am more sweat than blood, and wonder what miracle
keeps chocolate from melting in his hands.

They’re toffee, he points out,
as if it makes a difference.
I tell him, No thanks.

His smile is an accordion, stretching as he says,
Jesus loves you,
then compressing when I walk away.

The next day he’s at it again, working the angles—
the overweight and under-will-powered,

old ladies with costume jewelry crosses
hanging from their necks like bullseyes,

parents of sugar-starved children who recognize
the word no as a grenade pin they don’t dare pull.

He asks for charity from all but one—
a dark-skinned man in a turban.

Would it really offend Jesus
if offered chocolate from a Muslim?
Would the nougat be any less sweet?

He seems to think so,
and I am sad for this world.

Give me one instead where Jesus and Mohammad
sit around eating Hershey’s Kisses,
waiting for Krishna to arrive with devil’s food cake.

The bodies falling from the towers
could be coins flipping end over end
through black smoke water,
could be hard blurry rain piercing
carbon saturated clouds to bounce off of
the pavement and shatter.
Could be anything but people
choosing the ground instead of the fire.

Later that night, near cable airport,
I sit will on the hood
of my Lincoln and marvel
that the sky is empty of airplanes.
I will think that the silence is starved
for the roar of a rotary engine
churning through thin frozen air,

But that night, out in the black,
There are only the dewy afterimages
of satellites weaving in and out
of ghost-story constellations.

Although I cannot see it,
I will know those dim, blinking lights
are howling back digital echoes
of all those people plunging earthward,
a hard rain of ones and zeros,
so absent of the merciful grace
of leaves shaken from a tree,
of a paper airplane swooping low,
of ash drifting to rest on rooftops. Contents

Before school on September 11, 2001, bad AM radio in my car in the parking lot blares what everyone else is hearing or has already heard: The World Trade Center towers. They’re down. Oh my God. It’s confirmed.

There’s a stunned, quiet quality to the morning as faculty pass each other outside buildings and in corridors, whisper or turn away shaking our heads. There’s latent, disturbing excitement as well: Will something else happen? Will a building, a bomb, a plane explode somewhere in L.A.? During the morning’s first class, one of my freshmen bursts in wearing a red, white and blue tank top (perhaps selected as her mother listened to the news?). She whoops, arms held up over her head, cheerleader style: “Yeah! U–S–A!”

“Stop,” I say as she flops into her desk. “It’s not a football game.”

I can’t exactly blame her for not knowing how to show she takes the tragedy seriously. Many students seem extra watchful for cues from us, yet this sad and scary morning, no direction is forthcoming from the central administration, from any unified body of adults. It occurs to me how, almost twenty years earlier, I had been scratching notes in Government class when our principal’s voice came across the intercom to briefly acknowledge the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. Today there are no sober announcements, no moments of silence. All of us seem wandering as if expecting a divine, or at least official, voice to name the moment. By the next day, someone suggests we assemble students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance outside, under the campus flag. Everyone is encouraged to wear red, white and blue to show unity. I suggest black. Some of us do wear black. […]

The night I turned twenty-one, I hid behind a locked door and toilet
and cried harder than I had at my grandfather’s funeral two years earlier.
Voices on the other side were saying sorry but plans had to change
and they hoped I understood that I would be going to Tahoe without them.
My sister somehow found her way inside our parents’ bathroom,
putting arms around me. I couldn’t stop crying.
The recording of my voice on loop, the play button stuck in place,
the frequency only I could hear. Saying things that hurt like only truth could.

Things fell apart the first and only time I’ve fallen in love.
The day the power went out at Cal Poly, the girl got her hands around
my heart, lungs, throat, then squeezed until viscera ran down her wrists.
She did it with a simple sentence: I hope my boyfriend’s dad is okay.
Then she did it again and again, a little gentler each time
or maybe every inch of my body just grew accustomed to the sensation.
Once with a guitar. Once with a pickup truck on the Fourth of July.
Once on the day I drank snakebite and shook her boyfriend’s hand.
Then I tried to find God in a library cubicle, but he wasn’t there.
He wasn’t at the bottom of an empty bottle either, not the day
I drank alone because the mountains were whiter than I’d ever seen,
not the night I passed out laughing at my sister’s disgust
on our parents’ front lawn. God wasn’t in the toilet either,
no matter how much I screamed for him, the echo chamber
making me nauseous. I let my hair grow out from winter to summer
and hid from every camera. I spun my car out entering the 57,
cursed it the whole way from Diamond Bar to Chino the day the transmission blew
and I couldn’t afford a tow truck, wanted nothing more than to beat it
with a bat the day after it saved my life on the 60 freeway.
I punched a few walls. The day of my father’s birthday I told the girl I loved
how that felt in a letter left on a windshield and didn’t see her again
for three weeks. I parked my new used car and shut the garage door.
Left the engine on, turned the radio up, and screamed.
I told myself later it was all an accident.

The morning I turned twenty-two, I wore a black shirt sleeve sewn shut
on one end to hide the last bad haircut I ever paid for. I walked on tiptoe
the exact minute my mother gave birth after nineteen hours of labor
so as not to wake her. I turned on the television and kept the volume low.
I never turned on the television in the morning. A building fell,
and I thought of Las Vegas and demolition.

I only saw the second plane. Then the afterimages.

The day I turned twenty-two, people were apologetic in one breath,
then insistent in the next on celebration. I opened presents in front of the television.
Talking heads on loop, the on button stuck in place, a frequency
everyone wanted to hear even though it hurt. There was cake and too many hands
squeezing my shoulder, meaning reassurance, only causing muscles to spasm.
I walked out to be alone and studied the empty California sky.
And for the first time in a year, I thought of something other than myself. Contents